How to Read the Bible

27. The Creation of the Bible

27 The Creation of the Bible An Abundance of Ignorance We know little about the Bible’s origin—how so many books comprising so many diverse ideas became “the Bible.”1 Clearly, the process happened in stages, over a long time. Nobody woke up one morning, decided to create the Bible, and arranged the next day for all Jews to adopt it as such. The process was at least as much “down-up” as “up-down.” That is, the wider population helped to determine what the Bible included; it was not primarily an official (rabbinic) decision.2 Indeed, the Bible likely came into being before the publication of the Mishnah, the first great rabbinic work (ca. 200 C.E.). This is why few rabbinic opinions describe the Bible’s development. In any case, the rabbis were not interested in history for its own sake, so we need to interpret all rabbinic evidence with care. Meanwhile, some prerabbinic evidence comes from Josephus and other Jewish Hellenistic authors. Also the Dead Sea Scrolls shed light on the process of “how the Bible became the Bible,” but that evidence is indirect and often ambiguous. In short, too much of the picture is obscure to enable me to offer a definite time line of “project milestones.” The Canon Until recently, scholars addressed the questions raised above in terms of the “canon” of the Bible. Some of us, however, have recently emphasized that this term (related to the Greek work kanon, a “reed” or a “measuring stick”) may be anachronistic in reference to the Bible; it more properly refers to “a fixed standard (or collection of writings) that defines the faith and identity of a particular religious community.”3 The early Church first used this term with reference to 273 lists of books that are part of the Christian Bible. It is not native to early Jewish literature concerning what is part of—or excluded from—the Bible. Applied to the Jewish Bible, “canon” has been used in many ways, making it an ambiguous and confusing term.4 For these reasons, many scholars prefer to speak of “the development of scripture,” rather than “the canonization of the Bible.”5 Yet that is not much of an improvement. For me at least, “scripture” is a foreign term. Furthermore, because “scripture” means merely “that which is written,” it is historically imprecise . Therefore, I prefer to frame our question as follows: When and how did a central set of books with a particular name (e.g., mikra [ar+q4m1, “that which is read or recited”] or kitvei ha-kodesh [Dd#Oq